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Where Do Dummy Email Addresses Go?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Jul 11, 2004 09:52 AM
from the but-what-does-it-mean-man dept.
from the but-what-does-it-mean-man dept.
ajain writes "Maybe a year and a half back or so, I started using someone@somewhere.com as a dummy email id in online blogs, guestboks, forums, and sundry pages. But then I started wondering what if someone actually tried to email me on that email address. I was sure that it would bounce because I assumed that there wouldn't be an actual email address like that. In any case, just for fun, I decided to google on someone@somewhere.com. And lo behold, there are some 4090 results! I have written a small article at my blog and a reader says NoOne@NoWhere.com is another contender. Do you use some common dummy email IDs too, to get around the privacy problem online? Isn't there a potential for malicious misuse of someone's email ID in this way?"
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isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
the answer is "yes", move along.
Re:isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
There's some good info here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4051 [oreillynet.com]
and here:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2606.html [faqs.org]
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So you're the one! (Score:5, Funny)
When we find you, we will KICK YOUR ASS!!!!!
Sincerely,
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Re:isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Funny)
I hope AOL appreciates my efforts
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I can just see this... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh dear... I can see this already.
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 555666
Are we satisfied with the length of our penis?
Symptoms: You are unsure if we at Microsoft Support are satisfied with the length of our collective penis.
Resolution: To solve the problem:
Status: Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the internet e-mail system, which thanks to our insecure e-mail apps and OSses, has gotten a lot worse than it should. Also, stupid users are to blame.
The information in this article applies to: Yourself you good for nothing spammer, Clippy.
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Network Solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nonexistent domains (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Nonexistent domains (Score:5, Interesting)
hmmmm...all this bandwidth being wasted.
I feel it's my duty to the internet to point these clowns to h4wh4w@127.0.0.1.
You'd be suprised how many sites will actually allow this, since the regular expressions that check them usually allow for identifier@sub.dns.com.country, with each allowing [a-zA-Z0-9].
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Begin the Google Fight! (Score:5, Interesting)
someone@somewhere.com VS none@none.com [googlefight.com]
4090 to 6660
Round 1 goes to None@None.com
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Re:Begin the Google Fight! (Score:4, Informative)
I sorta pity whoever owns @nowhere.com
(Actually, there is someone who owns @NoWhere.com, registered back in 1994 according to WhoIs. However, there are no NS, MX or SOA records so e-mail to that domain goes nowhere.)
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Re:Begin the Google Fight! (Score:4, Funny)
http://web.archive.org/web/*/nowhere.com
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Re:isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
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example.com handling has changed (Score:5, Informative)
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asdf (Score:5, Informative)
seems I'm not alone:
http://www.asdf.com/asdfemail.html [asdf.com]
http://www.asdf.com/whatisasdf.html [asdf.com]
Mail Somewhere (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, The Irony... (Score:5, Informative)
It turns out that as the internet became more and more popular, more and more people started using someone@somewhere.com as the address they'd put into email when they didn't want the originator of the email to be known. For example, forwarded mail where you don't want the person who forwarded it to get mad at you for publishing their email address.
So he started getting a lot of crank email to somewhere.com - people complaining that he shouldn't send them mail about Jesus' third coming in a UFO, and stuff like that. For a while he tried sending mail to these people to clue them in, but of course they were un-cluable.
Eventially, it got to the point where he was mostly getting the kind of stuff you get when you've been joe-jobbed - angry replies to actual spam of the kind to which we've sadly become accustomed. It was then that he started analyzing the responses, and I'm pretty sure this is what inspired his anti-spam work.
Messagefire, the anti-spam service he started, really rocks. It's too bad that they've stopped accepting new customers. Sigh. Because I know him, I got in on the ground floor, and am still using it to filter my spam. It's wildly successful, and I'm very grateful to him for setting it up. I hope at some point they start selling service again.
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Mailinator (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mailinator (Score:5, Informative)
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This is what example.com is for (Score:5, Informative)
However, I find that for cases where you can be reasonably certain your address is NEVER going to be used for legitimate purposes (such as cases like this where the context implies the address is useless and it will only be treated as real by harvesters), you can skip the middle man by using uce@ftc.gov
Re:This is what example.com is for (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:This is what example.com is for (Score:5, Funny)
A much much more apropriate one in a that genre is bill_clinton@whitehouse.com.
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The winner is foo@bar.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The winner is foo@bar.com (Score:4, Funny)
fuckyou@fuckyou.com [google.com]
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Re:The winner is foo@bar.com (Score:5, Informative)
user@domain.com [google.com] - 17,100.
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Plenty of open alternatives (Score:5, Informative)
If you do want to recieve email but only, say, once from a company then you'll be looking at SpamGourmet [spamgourmet.com] which provides simple, free, fowarding addresses that expire after X hits.
That reminds me... (Score:5, Funny)
o/~ Don't dump your muck in my dustbin... (Score:5, Interesting)
Once Upon A Time, a friend of mine had a domain that spelled a major ISPs name backwards (he registered it on purpose, and joked that he was the "anti-big vendor" and gave shell accounts to friends, friends of friends, etc.
Then, someone started posting to usenet a lot, who was a customer of Big Vendor , and he 'spam-proofed' his address by ever so cleverly spelling it backwards.
Suddenly dozens if not hundreds of undeliverable messages started landing on Mike's server for some clown over at ReallyBigISP.
So, like any good sysadmin, he corrected this oversight, adding a sendmail rule to deliver mail for jrluser@psigib.com to jrluser@bigisp.com.
The moral of the story: Do not create harm for some innocent third party with your spam evasion techniques. It may come back to haunt you.
It was you!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe a year and a half back or so, I started using someone@somewhere.com as a dummy email id in online blogs, guestboks, forums, and sundry pages. But then I started wondering what if someone actually tried to email me on that email address.
So.... you're the jackass who clogged up my mailbox with all this crap. Thanks alot, pal!
Use a reserved domain name (Score:5, Informative)
Ex boss.. (Score:4, Funny)
No-risk, non-abusable (Score:5, Informative)
The best way I've found, though, is mailinator.com. Every @mailinator.com account "exists" (is created as needed), and other than (perhaps) root, abuse, etc., they aren't passworded. So you don't even have to set up a junk account, just make up the address on the fly. Be sure to delete any emails with passwords in 'em ASAP, of course.
Itsnot@real.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Why are you causing spam? (Score:4, Informative)
Technically, its illegal (Score:5, Interesting)
2 - you are assuming the identity of someone else, again with intent.
3 - improperly using others resources, or causing harm to others resources..
Doubt anyone would ever be tried and convicted under the law, but in this day and age, when people are jailed just for speaking, and the government will monitor what books you read, anything is possible..
Re:Technically, its illegal (Score:5, Interesting)
When somebody asks for your email address, they're asking for a way to contact you--like a phone number. They're not asking for you to uniquely identify yourself as you would with a driver's license or passport, they're only asking how they can reach you.
Email is not identity, and using a dummy email address is not illegal.
Parent
The correct way (Score:4, Informative)
Somewhere.Com - The Scoop (Score:5, Informative)
Spam didn't exist at the time. The first warning signs were when we'd occasionally get email bounces. Some versions of 'mail' on Unix, when unable to figure out who to return a bounce to, would send it to somewhere!name-of-the-user. Sendmail would helpfully turn that into somewhere.com, and we'd get the email.
When spam started, we started getting bounce backs. Spammers were using it as a "fake" domain. In those days somewhere's mail system was a Mac 8500 on a cable modem. Life would get very interesting when all of AOL's mail servers started throwing bounces at me as fast as they could. I had originally been bouncing messages back with messages asking people to stop--that had to change to straight rejections.
As a result of the time I was spending handling somewhere's email problems, I got into the anti-spam business. Initially writing tools to track spammers (http://www.spamwatcher.com/ is still up, although I don't know how well the spam analysis stuff is working). Later I co-founded Messagefire, an end-user anti-spam service.
In the meantime somewhere's email flow continued to climb. It's doubled every year. Hoaxes like the one about "wormalert@somewhere.com" (put it in your address book, and the fact that it's fake will cause viruses to die) didn't help. Nor did Microsoft FrontPage shipping with webmaster@somewhere.com as the default address in its templates. Axis shipped an internet enabled video camera that that (if you turned on the email feature) defaulted to sending all your security pictures to somewhere.com. (They've fixed it, but there are still cameras out there sending us a picture every 5-10 seconds.). Viruses that picked up all the references to somewhere.com off of people's address book and web caches started to account for more than a third of the email. People signing up for things with "fake" addresses accounted for a lot as well. (Why anyone would use an email address at a domain and not check to see if the domain existed first, I have no clue. Neither, apparently, do a lot of people who enter fake email addresses.) By last year we were rejecting 100,000 messages a day, of which close to 40,000 were going to someone@somewhere.com. I upgraded my DSL line to 768k just to handle the flow, and I had to limit my mail server to 100 simultaneous connections at a time.
This year we sold Messagefire to a Seattle company called MessageGate, and I now work for them. We use somewhere.com to stress test our enterprise anti-spam and compliance software. That happened only just in time; my router was starting to fail frequently under the load. Now the mail's on a high-bandwidth connection with multiple machines to handle the load--I just pick up the legitimate addresses after the spam has been filtered out.
I haven't looked in on it in several months, but we did let the email run unthrottled once early this year. After a few hours we were looking at enough bandwidth saturate several T1's, and volume of at least one million messages a day.
A couple things in summary.
1. Don't use fake email addresses. If you don't trust the site you are giving your email address too, then why are you doing business with them? If you're afraid of spam because you're posting your address publicly; then buy some anti-spam software. If I can manage to use legitimate email accounts on somewhere.com and not worry about spam, then obviously there's some out there that works well. I've been posting on usenet and the web using nazgul@somewhere.com for the past 9 years. The spammers definitely have my address. So what?
2. If you're going to make up a domain name, then *check* first to see if it's real! Better yet, don't. Just because it's not real now doesn't mean it won't be later. Use example.{com,net,org} if you must.
3. I see a number of people here s
Re:example.com? (Score:5, Insightful)
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using real address = pure evil!!! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:fake email (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:fake email (Score:5, Insightful)
the From: header can be easily forged and these privacy.net guys are just adding to the misuse of net traffic by replying.
spam should go to one of 2 places... an authority who can fine the sender, or /dev/null (preferably the mail server will reject the spam before even collecting it, such as grey listing does)
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Re:fake email (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Mailinator (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Who else? (Score:5, Funny)
Do some good - tell them about darl@sco.com
And if you can add a sig with HTML, Feel free to throw this little charm in as well:
<A HREF="http://www.thescogroup.com/">litigious bastards</A>
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RFC 2606 (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:poop@poop.com (Score:4, Funny)
Me, too! And if I have to put a (fake) name in, it'll be (First Name) Jenny (Last Name) Jenny.
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Re:a@b.com (Score:5, Informative)
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